A little bit of social engineering can go a long way. With cars becoming more connected than ever, cybersecurity is a hot-button topic that extends past your computer screen and into your car. Using a bit of technology, an alleged car thief was able to get his hands on a Model 3 at the Mall of America and drive away without needing a key.
Psychic Zoe has not had a very good week. On 9 May the fortune-teller, whose real name is Ann Thompson, was arrested by the New York Police Department on suspicion of defrauding clients out of over $800,000. You’d think she might have had a premonition the police would be knocking at her door but, alas, the future isn’t always crystal clear.
Nigerian business email compromise scams are growing more dangerous and sophisticated as cybercriminals add new tools and techniques to their arsenal such as remote access trojans (RATs) and advanced information stealers, researchers found. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 said in a report released Tuesday about Nigerian cybercrime that they found Nigerian business email compromise (BEC) linked incidents have shot up 45 percent in 2017 compared to the year prior, representing 17,600 attacks per month. But even beyond soaring cybercriminal incidents, criminals are becoming less of a pesky threat, such as Nigerian Prince 419-style email scams, and more dangerous.
The paper inadvertently offers an answer to a crucial question of our time: Why won’t Facebook just level with us? Why all the long, vague transparency pledges and congressional evasion? The study concludes that when the data mining curtain is pulled back, we really don’t like what we see.
There’s something unnatural about the kind of targeting that’s become routine in the ad world, this paper suggests, something taboo, a violation of norms we consider inviolable — it’s just harder to tell they’re being violated online than off. But the revulsion we feel when we learn how we’ve been algorithmically targeted, the research suggests, is much the same as what we feel when our trust is betrayed in the analog world.
You would think that after decades of analyzing and fighting email spam, there’d be a fix by now for the internet’s oldest hustle—the Nigerian Prince scam. There’s generally more awareness that a West African noble demanding $1,000 in order to send you millions is a scam, but the underlying logic of these “pay a little, get a lot” schemes, also known as 419 fraud, still ensnares a ton of people. In fact, groups of fraudsters in Nigeria continue to make millions off of these classic cons.
Verified accounts turning themselves into bots, millions of fake likes and comments, a dirty world of engagement trading inside Telegram groups. Welcome to the secret underbelly of Instagram.
Source: buzzfeed.com
Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas—a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential “Opportunities.”
For every phone number I get, I make $1.75.
Source: qz.com
Bryan Seely, a security expert who has written extensively about the use of fake search listings to conduct online bait-and-switch scams, said the purpose of sites like those that Seorehabs pays people to create is to funnel calls to a handful of switchboards that then sell the leads to rehab centers that have agreed to pay for them. Many rehab facilities will pay hundreds of dollars for leads that may ultimately lead to a new patient. After all, Seely said, some facilities can then turn around and bill insurance providers for thousands of dollars per patient.
He brought it to the attention of the manager, who promptly evacuated the 24-hour gym and called police. According to Saginaw Township Police Chief Donald Pussehl, a bomb-sniffing dog made a sweep of the premises, but it didn’t turn up any explosives.
Source: sophos.com
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.